20 Million Tiny Particles

2. Cary Pritchett

It had been one month since it happened.

I was standing at the counter when I realized it. A consigner called to schedule a pickup for her collection of 1980s Maxie fashion dolls, causing me to catch the date staring back at me from the wall calendar stapled to the wall beside the desktop monitor. One month. We made it a month.

Here's the thing about grief — it's a really silent thing, but boy is it loud as hell. The cliche "the elephant in the room" was created for grief. Created for the thing that everyone can see, that no one can ignore, that no one is acknowledging.

So it had been a month of that — of walking around the elephant, of picking up the trunk to get back to my daily routine, of poking and pushing at the skin hoping to get it to budge when I knew that it wouldn't.

And so far, nothing had really changed.

Well, that isn't fair — a lot had changed. Everything had changed. She was gone now, so of course nothing was the same as when she was here. Our world, from the dust collecting on the unsold furniture to the sound of the cat licking his belly, was nothing like it was before.

But somehow everything had chugged silently along in the same way as before, like everyone was pretending the elephant was now a new antique nestled among the rest.

It occurred to me as I stared at the calendar square that I didn't know what was sadder — that it had been a month since Mom had died, or that no one except me seemed to remember.

Me and, of course, Cary Pritchett.

Within hours of my discovering the importance of the day, Cary was in my face pounding on the elephant's backside, climbing over it with a plate of cookies in her hands. Metaphorically. Unfortunately she didn't even bring me cookies, only a pitiful pout hiding the lipstick on her front teeth and a whine of "You doin' okay, honey?"

Cary Pritchett was the great reminder that grief was a silent thing that wasn't silent at all. Cary Pritchett was a stranger, the mother of a classmate I hadn't said more than two words to since eighth grade, a person who rarely shopped at our store and probably had only ever even seen my mother from her rearview in the carpool line. She didn't know me in the slightest, but she knew before I did that the worst day of my life had happened exactly one month ago to the day.

"I'm fine," I answered. I tucked a piece of hair behind my ear and forced myself to look Cary Pritchett straight in the eyes. "How are you?"

She sunk her brow down into her eyes, flattening out her lips to sigh a little. "No, baby," she pressed, using a pet name that was common among women like her, women who thought they were proxy-parents only because they'd been seeing you at bake sales since you were in Oshkosh overalls. "How are you?"

I looked to the phone, hoping it would ring but knowing it wouldn't. I slipped into the Southern drawl that would make her comfortable and said, "I'm okay, Miss Cary. Thanks for checking on me."

She reached her hand across the counter to stroke mine, her gold bangles clanging against the scratched-up wood. Her hand was cold, way too cold for someone who'd just walked in from the eighty-degree downtown streets. I reflexively pulled back. "Sorry," I mumbled.

"It's okay, baby," she said, reaching back for the hand I had withdrawn. I looked down to see her veins, blue — bluer than they should be? — and popping out of her fair skin. She began to speak again but I saw her in slow motion, her sticky black hair sprayed out into wings around her ears not moving as she bobbed her head. She had a mole — a beauty mark, she'd call it — beneath her eye, pinkish and bulbous and popping out from her skin like a pimple. I wondered if she'd had that all her life. I wondered if that kind of thing was hereditary. I wondered if Blake, her son, who I'd had Algebra I, II, and III with but had not spoken to in years, had a mole like that. Or if his kids would.